The Fall of the House of Usher

About the book

The narrator approaches the Usher family home already troubled by its appearance and by the urgent request that brought him there. Roderick Usher's heightened sensitivities and his sister's illness give the visit an atmosphere of fragile confinement. Poe makes music, painting, reading, architecture, and bodily unease echo one another, so that attempts to understand the situation can deepen its pressure. The visitor hopes to offer companionship without sharing his friend's fears, but the boundaries of that distance become uncertain. The story's carefully sustained mood invites attention to repetition and correspondence rather than merely to incident. Its distinctive horror arises from the feeling that a family history, a building, and the minds inside it may be participating in the same disturbance.

• Family and decay
• Fear
• Mind and environment

Why read it

For an unusually concentrated Gothic atmosphere in which every artistic and physical detail seems to answer another.

English text